Editor’s note: LIFE@OSU is beginning a new series of features on interesting hobbies, passions and interests of OSU faculty and staff. If you have a suggestion, email [email protected] with your suggestion and we’ll check it out.

As a young woman just out of veterinary school in Switzerland, Carla Schubiger found herself traveling through the Alps with a car packed full of medical equipment, going from farm to farm helping livestock and family pets, and never knowing what was around the corner.

Schubiger remembers battling cold nights and self-doubt as she dealt with one new challenge after the next. “I was a woman in a male-dominated field, fresh out of college, out there delivering a calf for the first time and I couldn’t let the farmer know it was my first time.”

Despite the hardship, Schubiger thrived in her work, but after seven years she began to think it was time to look for new challenges. “Compassion fatigue is a real thing,” she said. She still wanted to work with animals, but she decided to shift her focus to something a little less furry, aquatic microbiology.

Schubiger not only left her traveling veterinary life behind but left Switzerland as well. She came to the United States to attend Washington State University, and then moved to Oregon State University in 2015 for a post-doc position with the Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine. She is now an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, where she focuses on seafood safety, infectious diseases of shellfish and commercial fish, and aquatic pathogens.

As a person who thrives on challenges, Schubiger admits she’s now past the point where she can uproot and completely switch her life’s direction, but she is always finding new ways to keep herself challenged on a personal level. Her current passion is competing in Ironman competitions, something that is a far cry from her childhood in Switzerland.

“I didn’t grow up doing sports,” she said. “Sports were not integrated into schools in Switzerland.” But when she moved to the United States and began working on a combined residency/PhD program, she needed a stress release, and a friend’s participation in Ironman events peaked her own interest. Not one to be intimidated by new things, she began working out and building up her endurance, and found that the practice was extraordinarily therapeutic.

“I’m most creative when I run. I really enjoy it, no music, just myself, it’s a lot of time you have thinking,” she said. “That’s what I like about running. I’m not a born athlete. I think it’s what I like about Ironman, is that it’s really long so you have a lot of time to reflect and think. The intensity is not extremely high so you don’t need intense focus. It’s therapeutic in a way.”

She also likes the independence of the sport.

“You’re always monitoring yourself and your surroundings. It’s more about yourself getting over that distance. I’m a very competitive athlete but it’s mostly against myself,” Schubiger said. “You can’t influence how others do on races anyway, so it’s all about you.”

The key to Ironman is not strength or speed, it’s endurance. The up to 17 hour event includes a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride, and a 26.22 mile marathon. The events are held all over the world, in a variety of beautiful and challenging locations. Schubiger has found herself competing in a wide range of environments, from diving off the back of a Norwegian ferry into a frigid fjord, to biking through Arizona’s high desert in chilly late fall, to twice competing in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, her favorite because she loves running in the humid warmth of the island.

“I’m not the fastest, I learned swimming when I was 30. But the person who can endure being uncomfortable the longest will actually win at the end. That’s something you don’t have in many other sports,” said Schubiger, because the Ironman requires participants to push past pain and fatigue. “It’s the nature of people to want to be comfortable, but the Ironman is 10 to 16 hours of being uncomfortable. If you can withstand the urge to stop when you feel that way, then you’ll get to the finish line a lot faster.”

Learning how to push past it is key to her training. And unlike some sports, Schubiger said pushing past those limits becomes easier as you age.

“I find that I’m getting better as I get older and have more life experience,” she said. “You can use energy from past experiences to fuel you, especially the bad stuff, and turn it into positive energy. You can say, ‘I’ve gone through that, I can totally do a marathon without stopping.”

It’s also about discipline, whether that’s forcing yourself to swim when you’re not in the mood or facing a bitterly cold day of biking. The rewards of discipline, she said, are access to a level of creativity and flow of thought that she never experienced before she started training.

“I always think it has something to do with your oxygen intake when you’re running,” she said. “But maybe it’s because you’re not sitting on your problems, or focused on it, it just pops up and then you’re like ‘Oh I have a new idea.’ It’s really fun. I often come home and say ‘Oh I need to write it down.’”

And while many Ironman participants enjoy the social aspect of training and participating in competitions (there’s even a Triathalon club on campus), Schubiger prefers to go it alone. She does have a trainer and does enjoy seeing people at the events, but for the most part, it’s just her and the road, or pool, as the case may be.

Schubiger only participates in one to two races a year. She said it’s easier to focus and give it all she has if she doesn’t race every few weeks. She had to take a year off after an injury, and getting back into it was a struggle, but now that she’s back to full strength she isn’t planning on quitting anytime soon.

“What I want people to know is that anyone can do it,” Schubiger said. “Ironman is geared for everyone. You can walk it if you want to, but the most important thing is pacing. If you push yourself hard at the beginning then you’re going to have a miserable 16 hours. But if you pace yourself then it can be really enjoyable.”

Schubiger said for her, breaking everything down into small intervals helps keep the race from becoming overwhelming. For instance, the marathon has food and drink stations at every mile, so she just focuses on reaching the next one, and then the next after that. It mentally keeps her focused on the small picture, rather than being overwhelmed at having to run for 26 miles.

“If you compartmentalize, it’s totally doable,” she said. “You learn a lot about managing time and your expectations. I apply that now in my work life as well, and in teaching students too.”

And for now, it’s a passion she’ll keep coming back to.

“It’s all about the challenge.”

~ Theresa Hogue